I thought since a few days have passed that I should let you know what’s happening with the slightly ridiculous LBC situation. If you skip to the bottom you will find a discussion on some mischievous activism which I think has great potential.

Since LBC unwisely threw their legal weight around to prevent you from being able to freely experience and ponder that astonishing 44 minute tirade against MMR, the inevitable has happened. The audio has been posted on a huge number of websites around the world, over 120 blogs so far are linking to the story, and more importantly, hundreds of thousands of people are talking and reading about the ignorance that Jeni Barnett exemplified in that worrying broadcast. It has been covered in the Times, and an Early Day Motion is being set down in parliament.

We should remember that this is not about Jeni – and it goes without saying that you should not be abusive towards her – it’s about how her work on the 7th of January exemplified everything the media has done for ten years now to create a vaccine panic, and it’s about the fact that we should be free to discuss that, and hear the clip, as it is instructive, and will help everyone to better understand how people like this help to create outbreaks of serious diseases.

The blogs covering the story are all listed below but a few really stand out.

Firstly, these six appeared out of the blue and into the fray, devoting hours to producing a transcript in the hope that this would be less likely to trigger legal action from LBC. I’m extremely grateful for their moral support:

The audio has appeared in more places than I can count, with WikiLeaks being a clear example, as well as the inevitable YouTube.

Listening again, you really can hear how well Jeni exemplifies the media’s misrepresentations which have caused so much harm to public health. We’ve had a mumps outbreak in 2005, and now measles is on the rise. The looong story is spread around the sciencier bits of the web (or if you like paper then in my book, or this one) but essentially you can see the history of the vaccine panic in two sets of graphs. Infectious diseases had of course been declining for a couple of centuries, but this is when vaccines were introuced:

You can also see that the MMR vaccine, and a concerted coverage programme, was associated with an almost final drop in measles. And then on the following graphs we can see what happened when people like Jeni Barnett, Melanie Philips, Carol Vorderman, and the entire British news media decided that vaccines cause autism.

Measles is not a trivial infection for everyone who gets it. Some will have brain damage, some will die.

The debate is no longer about MMR, it is about the dangers of an ill-informed media, and that’s why I’m so glad to see that people are finally taking notice of how startlingly irresponsible so many journalists and editors have been in this regard.

“That this house expresses its support for the use of the combined MMR vaccine, notes with concern the re-emergence of measles and the loss of life and long term health problems which will afflict children as a result of the decline in the vaccination rate which followed Dr Andrew Wakefield’s now discredited research paper suggesting a link between MMR and autism; expresses its disappointment that ill-informed comments by presenters such as Jeni Barnett on her LBC radio show will continue to cause unfounded anxieties for many parents and are likely to result in some parents choosing not to vaccinate their children, recognises the right of Jeni Barnett as a parent to make her own judgement about vaccinations for her own children but implores her and others in the media to act more responsibly when making comments in the public domain and expresses its hope that in the future, reporting of the issue of MMR will be less sensationalist and more evidence based”

I assume (and I suppose hope) that I will hear no more from the lawyers at Global Radio and LBC now that I’ve taken down the clip, and in any case it can now be freely heard and discussed all over the place. As John Gilmore said: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. If they return making threats I don’t know what I will do, but we can cross that bridge.

It’s been interesting to learn about the law from a dozen or so passinglawyers who have popped up to comment. Basically, there is no clear answer on whether posting 44 minutes of foolishness for discussion is legal or not, and the only way to find out is to go to court. Now, given that lawyers are expensive, and the loser is probably liable for the winner’s legal fees, it strikes to me that a company like Global Radio worth over half a billion pounds has a bit of an advantage in this situation, since losing, for me, would mean losing, well, I don’t actually have anything to lose.

My point is, without being too Billy Bragg about it all: this is a law that apparently works a bit better for wealthy people.

I think it is reasonable to find this frustrating. In medicine we have protocols: we try to lay out very clearly and simply how something works, what the likely outcomes are, the best moves, and so on. I don’t see why this would be difficult in law. Doctors and academics have been bending over backwards to make their work readily accessible and understandable to people outside the profession for many years, with considerable success. Lawyers, meanwhile, with the assistance of judges and those who make laws, seem sometimes to make their money out of obfuscation, out of the uncertainties and continent-sized grey areas. To me that’s not just unhealthy, it also feels eerily unfamiliar, to come across an industry where so many key players seem to have a paradoxical interest in making things not work.

Anyway.

Before we get onto a nice quote from Jeni I think it would be good to discuss what we can do about all of this. Obviously you must get your MP to sign the EDM. I’ve also been chatting to Simon Singh (I just write and talk, he’s much more sinister than me when it comes to strategy) and we have informally considered a coordinated campaign of civil disobedience, essentially everyone phoning in to LBC whenever Jeni (or anyone?) is on, demanding an apology, some public recognition of the harm that can come from irresponsible broadcasting, and an undertaking that she will not broadcast on the topic of health again without getting a basic understanding of the issues.

I’m not sure about this, as I think there is moral high ground to be lost, but I would be very glad of your views. It is certainly the case that while newspapers and TV stations can and do ignore their public, collectively we could actually cripple the phone-in component of LBC, in response to their irresponsible broadcasting, as an act of protest, which is an interesting thought.

There is complaining to OFCOM, although I have no doubt that they will prove to be as spineless as the PCC, and it’s possible that their constitution is written in such a way that complaints about this kind of obvious wrongdoing are not upheld. Gimpyblog notes: “Jeni Barnett may be irresponsible and unapologetic but she is acting within her rights, and apparently
within OFCOM guidelines, which are firm on subjects such as sex, drugs and the occult, but not on public health”. It’s hard to see how the Jonathan Ross / Russell Brand / Andrew Sachs saga is a huge issue but this, on public health, is not, but there you go.

Those who have written to LBC seem to have received “we did little wrong and we fixed it fine ourselves” responses from their Programme Director (he gave me, I am sorry to say, what I experienced as gales of shouty self-righteousness when he telephoned me, which I felt was an unhelpful use of “off the record”, but I have no interest in personal disputes). This all suggests to me that there is little insight, and therefore little chance of improvement internally at LBC. It may be worth complaining to the parent company Global Radio, although I can’t find a clear way to.

There is also, of course, the wider issue. You could regard this as your stimulus to make a pledge to take on anti-vaccine quacks wherever they appear, and make a deposit in the karma bank, promising to write a letter, or a blog entry, or make a formal complaint about the next outburst you see in the media. I think this is very important.

Please let me know if you have any other ideas.

And lastly I will leave you with some Jeni joy. After explaining endlessly that all she wanted to do was “start a debate” (because in the media everything is 50:50, and the truth lies exactly half way between the two most extreme views), Jeni has first deleted a couple of hundred comments from her blog, criticising her ideas and actions. Like a poem about the media’s MMR coverage for the past 10 years, it seems this is a “debate” where one person asking stupid questions has complete control over the microphones and can edit, delete, and disappear views at will. It is no longer permissible, for example, to read any defenses of Yasmin on Jeni’s site, the nurse who rang in to disagree with LBC’s presenter from an informed perspective. Jeni describes this nurse, on her now commentless “blog”, as “vicious”.

Luckily Jeni’s posts, and all comments to the blog, are archived for you by Le Canard Noir here:

I don’t think Yasmin was vicious. I think she was very polite and patient. I don’t think if I was LBC I would welcome a wealthy presenter with a platform using it to attack a member of the public who rang in to my radio station, but there you go. Yasmin and I have spoken since and she is pursuing her own formal complaints. How can I demonstrate her unviciousness to you? With the clip itself. Here is Yasmin talking to Jeni. She’s very good.

TIMESTAMP 39:00 into Jeni Barnett LBC Segment, 7 January 2009.

JB: And I think that the reason you fill up my telephone-there are no calls being able to come in at the minute- is because you’re phoning is because there isn’t a definitive answer. There is no absolute answer.

As a parent, whether you are male or female, you have to make a decision based on your family history. I took my daughter who kept getting ear infections when she was a kid and one of the doctors said to me, “If you do not give her an asthma spray, and do not do this, that and the other, she will die within a week”. You don’t say that to a young mum, well, I was an old mum but she was only a little person.

Since I had asthma and my mother in law died of asthma and I’ve told you this before, that doctor didn’t take into account where I was coming from. I required him to look in my child’s ear and give me some indication of what was going on so I could make an informed decision.

I, however, am not like Yasmin in Chelsea. You would – what would you have done in that situation?

Yasmin: I’m just wondering how much longer your programme is on air. Because I give hundreds of MMR vaccines and all the work that we do in general practice is probably being undone by your programme in 15 minutes and I think it’s very irresponsible.

JB: Why. [Indistinct]

Yasmin: It doesn’t seem to be based on any facts. I’m very sorry to hear that your child had autism but if you…

Yasmin: Somebody else’s child, I’m very sorry to hear that. But if they read the Wakefield study in the Lancet in 1998, Dr Wakefield actually said that he didn’t prove an association between MMR and…

JB: Well he wasn’t really allowed to have his say, was he, Yasmin. He was kinda…

Yasmin: I think he was. I think he said it recently in court.

JB: But you’re not…

Yasmin: I think he’s being tried for medical negligence. I think that your programme is extremely irresponsible. You’re talking…

JB: Ah, let me just ask this…Let me ask you this before you go on with that.

How, if you are so certain that your MMR jab is correct, how can 15 minutes on LBC 97.3 rock what people are thinking?

TIMESTAMP 41:00

Yasmin: Well, you’d be surprised. And at the moment we are expecting a measles epidemic and it’s because of people like Ken Livingstone and people like yourself.

You talk about young mothers who have a very difficult decision to make and, I agree, they do, and I spend a lot of time talking to them. But people like you don’t really make it any easier for them.

And you were just talking about somebody with an ear infection. I’ve been talking to somebody I know who had a child who woke up with the contents of their ear on the pillow and that was down to the rubella virus.

So you really need to think about what you’re doing here and why you’re doing it.

JB: Well, you see, I could argue, Yasmin, that you have to think about it, too. I’m allowed…

Yasmin: I do, every day.

JB: And so do I, as a parent, and that’s what I’m saying.

Yasmin: I’m a parent. And one of my children has had 3 doses of measles [sic. Possibly meant MMR] and there’s no problem with it. You could have a hundred doses of measles [sic. Possibly meant MMR] and it would do nothing.

[Yasmin and JB talk over each other]

JB: But why give them the vaccine if they get the measles? I never can understand that.

Yasmin: We don’t give vaccines to children who have had measles. They need a combined vaccine of measles, mumps and rubella.

TIMESTAMP 42:00

If they have one dose the studies show that they possibly need to be revaccinated within a couple of years to make sure that that protection carries on for life.

JB: Do you not think, though, that as a parent, I am allowed to make a decision about what I put in my kid’s body?

Yasmin: Yes. And do you not think that a parent whose child has cancer and is having chemotherapy and has a much lower resistance to things like measles, mumps and rubella, has a right for their child to go to normal Primary…

JB: Absolutely, absolutely.

Yasmin: A normal Primary School. But because there may be one child in the class, such as yours, who is lucky to have the immunity, that child might get measles, mumps or rubella and die.

JB: Yasmin, my daughter did not have decent immunity which is exactly why I did not have her inoculated.

Yasmin: We don’t. We wait until your child is well and fit enough to give the MMR.

JB: But I don’t want my child to be fiddled with with all sorts of stuff that’s in a vaccine. Now why…

[JB and Yasmin talk over each other]

Let me finish.

TIMESTAMP 43:00

Yasmin: Could you tell me what’s in the vaccine? What do you think is in the vaccine?

JB: No, I can’t.

Yasmin: Then how can you make a decision for your child? You’re taking about parents having to make decisions for the child but if you go into any secondary school, which I have done, we’ve been asked to vaccinate kids against MMR, they all say they want it.

If you’re deny immunisation then you’re denying health to your child and other children.

Yasmin: Then you’re one of the lucky ones aren’t you? If your kid had chemotherapy…

JB: Listen, listen, listen. Yasmin will you stop…Stop.

Yasmin: You’d want your child to be protected, wouldn’t you?

JB: Stop being so dramatic about it. If you

[JB and Yasmin talk over each other.]

Yasmin: You should think about what you’re doing in this programme. You’re doing a lot of damage. A lot of damage.

JB: Well, maybe. I don’t think so.

Yasmin: You don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t even tell me what’s in an MMR vaccine so you shouldn’t be talking about it.

JB: Well, I can get it…Shall I get it off the internet, Yasmin?

Yasmin: Yeah, get it off the internet, from a reliable source, the such as the Department of Health

JB: Really?

Yasmin: and then I might listen to you, yeah.

JB: The Department of Health frightens people.

Thanks, Yasmin, for your call.

I think it’s quite interesting. When I was told I had a high blood sugar, I was told in that room I had diabetes. I don’t have diabetes, I have high blood sugar. My blood sugar’s normal now but they frightened me. Which is what people like Yasmin does.

This is LBC 97.3.

Blogs covering the LBC MMR story:

This list is adapted from the indefatigable and amazing Holfordwatch who have a regularly updating post here:

Martin Stabe makes a glancing reference to the kerfuffle and states that it is to Jeni Barnett’s credit that she defended herself and is allowing comments that disagree with her: Jeni Barnett: MMR and Me

Unity of the Ministry of Truth provides some pithy coverage of the issue, slightly incredulous that Jeni Barnett and the LBC lawyers seem to be ignorant of the Streisand Effect: Jeni Barnett – Pig Ignorant and Proud.

JQH is more than a little exasperated to realise that despite all of the attempts to improve her knowledge base: Jeni Barnett Does Not Get It.

The fatuity of the Jeni Barnett woman’s manner – her blend of self-righteousness and stupidity, her simply quite staggering inability to grasp, pursue or appreciate a sequence of logical steps – all these are signature characteristics of Britain these days. The lamentable truth is that most of the population wouldn’t really understand why we get so angry at this assault on reason, logic and sense. But we have to keep hammering away at these people and their superstitious inanities. We have to. Well done you and well done all you supporting. I’ve tweeted this site to my followers. I hope they all do their best to support you. Publish and be damned. We’ll fight them and fight them and fight them in the name of empricism, reason, double blind random testing and all that matter.
Love
Stephen xxxtwitter.com/stephenfry

I think LBC and Jeni should issue a clear apology for the show, prominently and in the same slot. I think they should make some public acknowledgement of the harm that can come from such irresponsible broadcasting, and give a clear undertaking that Jeni will not broadcast on the topic again, or any medical stories, without getting a basic understanding of the issues. I know that they won’t, but that’s what I think they should do, and I think they should release this clip freely so that we can all understand and discuss the anti-vaccination, anti-reason movement better, and try to prevent them from doing any more harm. That is what the clip is needed for, I think it is only fair that we should be able to have this discussion, and they should be keen to facilitate it. I think they misjudged this situation, and they could very easily set it right.

I think, in all honesty, that these people need to grow some insight.

.

Manners:

I am incredibly grateful to Positive Internet who host this blog for free: they have been amazing, with the on-call engineers working in the middle of the night to get everything back online when it became clear we could no longer cope with the traffic. They even fixed my cackhanded wordpress install. If you make the corporate decisions in your workplace then you should absolutely use them, I’ve genuinely never seen anything like it. I don’t need money for legal costs or anything so no donations please, unless you want to subsidise sellotape to fix the laptop or help me get admin/research assistance.

Oh and for a day or so comments will take a while to appear because the page can only rebuild itself occasionally when the traffic is so high.

As well as everything you’ve said about the potential damage to public health caused by Jeni’s broadcast, the letter could suggest something along the lines that it undermines their support of children’s charities: www.thisisglobal.com/charities/

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If you like what I do, and you want me to do more, you can: buy my books Bad Science and Bad Pharma, give them to your friends, put them on your reading list, employ me to do a talk, or tweet this article to your friends. Thanks!
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155 Responses

ivy said,

You have made several allegations against Dr. Wakefield and his studies Mr. Goldacre. Could you kindly tell us why is Dr. Wakefield not struck off the GMC register? Mind you he is only facing the GMC for ethical issues and not for the studies. That tells us something don’t you think?

I have another question. Is it a possibility that parents are not actually following the press, rather they merely want the option of single vaccines for their children? Why underestimate the public and think everyone follows what the press tells us?

When you raise allegations, you need to be armed with answers to questions directed at you.

carolm said,

How absolutely absurd! I have never heard of this woman before in my life (I’m Australian) but everything she says is just brain drool. And it sounds all the more ridiculous transcribed. I cannot wrap my head around the idea that she doesn’t want to return to days when children died of these diseases BUT she believes it’s “an individual choice”. Every time I try to understand what that means, I feel as though my brain has been anaesthetised. Does she want people to vaccinate their children or not? Does she want her children getting these diseases or not? I’m not sure she even knows her position.

And if I hear one more person say “I’m not a doctor BUT…” or “I’m not a scientist BUT…” I will cry with frustration.